The Work Of Poetry: Pleasure, Terror New Direction Brings New Reward

January 09, 1992|by HAL MARCOVITZ, The Morning Call

As a young girl growing up in Virginia, Hayden Saunier walked past statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in her hometown of Charlottesville, where the local courthouse features a Civil War cannon on the front lawn.

On the family farm, she would often find lead fragments imbedded in a tree -- century-old remnants of cavalry skirmishes between the Blue and the Gray.

"You are constantly confronted with the artifacts of war in ways that I don't think anybody else in the country is confronted with," says Saunier. "You have to drive through battlefields to get places. That's hard to contemplate."

Perhaps, but that way of life in the South was inspiration for a poem Saunier wrote after thinking about her discovery of some gun-shot lead in a tree trunk on her family's farm.

She titled it "House by a Battlefield."

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Door slams echo

across the field

along the fenceline

to the ragged oaks

and hang there.

Not a sound comes back.

The argument

may blow over,

may shake down

with leaves

all sap retracted,

or like the gunshots

buried in the treetrunks

stay suspended

in the wood and rip

the chain from your saw

each time you try to clear away the limbs

brought down by last year's ice.

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"House by the Battlefield," as well as other poems Saunier has written during the past three years, earned her recognition as the 1991 Bucks County Poet Laureate. She is the 15th recipient of the honor, which is awarded by a panel of Bucks County writers and poets.

Saunier, 35, may write a lot about farm fields in Virginia, but she hardly comes across now as somebody who would rise at 5 a.m. to bale hay.

"We had a place up in the mountains we'd go to farm," she says. "My parents thought it was a great idea. When you are a teen-ager the last thing you want to do is spend a weekend on a farm up in the mountains."

Indeed, Saunier did leave the farm. After obtaining a degree in drama from the University of Virginia, Saunier moved to New York, where she spent seven years as an underemployed actress.

Actually, she says, it wasn't a bad living. She did a lot of work in regional theater and appeared in enough TV commercials to pay her bills.

In 1987 she visited friends in Bucks County and decided to stay in the area. A year later, Saunier met her husband, psychologist Reb Brooks, and the couple moved into a home in Doylestown with antiques in the living room, random-width floors in the dining room and soft classical guitar playing on the stereo.

And she still does some acting work. Saunier is currently appearing in "St. Joan" at the Arden Theater in Philadelphia. She also has found a niche as an actress in industrial training films.

Her latest role? As the star of an instructional film for executives on how to fire their employees. Saunier portrayed the executive.

Writing had always interested her and she first tried screenplays. In fact, Saunier wrote two of what she calls "artful" screenplays that movie producers accepted on options. But the screenplays sat on the producers' shelves and the options ran out.

"I promised myself I'd try to stop writing artful screenplays and write commercial screenplays so I could put something in the bank," she says. "So I decided to be artful with poetry. As a result, I'm struggling with artful poetry and not writing commercial screenplays. I'm destined to be poor and in a rented room when I'm 85."

She first tried writing poetry in 1988. Saunier joined a poetry workshop at Bucks County Community College and found the experience enjoyable but, at times, terrifying.

The enjoyable part was writing poetry and hearing other people's work. The terrifying part was getting up in front of 10 strangers and reading her poetry -- a frightening experience even for someone with a New York stage background.

That's because poetry, at least to Saunier, involves writing about deeply personal experiences.

"It was terrifying until you begin to get over the initial horror of having people say, `I have no idea what you mean,'" she says.

What does she write about?

"In general, I don't know how to answer that," she says. "More than anything, I try to write about any kind of moment or experience that solidified somehow for me. Sometimes it's a single moment, sometimes it's a series of moments. I've written about friends who have died; about eating crabs, breaking down in a car. Poetry is such a wonderful, precise literary form."

Here are some examples:

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I wipe fog from the lens

of my camera, twist it

to the spindly tripod,

drag the apparatus

down the stairs into the dining room

where the walls are painted

almost peach and shimmer

as the yellow underneath

wears through,

glows in the heat.

-- From "The Photograph."

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The freezing

and unfreezing

earth yields up

another crop of stone

and bits of flintlocks,

horseshoes, buckles,

globes of mud-caked lead

the shape of misshaped mouths forced up

among the bayonets

of new grass

and the stalks of corn

cracked under by the disc.

-- From "Farming Virginia."

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Saunier is still a bit surprised at receiving the recognition of the poet laureate committee. As someone who spent seven years trying to find work as an actress in New York, she understands rejection and had really never expected to win the award. It was the first poetry contest she entered.

"In the theater, your life is all about rejection," she says. "Being rewarded this way has never happened to me in my life."